Outlaw
In , an outlaw is declared as outside the protection of the . In pre-modern societies, the criminal is withdrawn all legal protection, so that anyone is legally empowered to or kill them. Outlawry was thus one of the harshest penalties in the legal system. In , the is conspicuously absent, and outlawing is the most extreme punishment, presumably amounting to a death sentence in practice. The concept is known from , as the status of , and persisted throughout the . In the of England, a "Writ of Outlawry" made the pronouncement ("Let his be a wolf's head", literally "May he bear a wolfish head") with respect to its subject, using "head" person (cf. "per capita") and equating that person with a wolf in the eyes of the law: not only was the subject deprived of all legal rights of the law being outside the "law", but others could kill him on sight as if he were a wolf or other wild animal. Women were declared "waived" rather than outlawed but it was effectively the same punishment. Legal history Ancient Rome Among other forms of , included the penalty of interdicere aquae et ignis ("to forbid water and fire"). People so penalized were required to leave Roman territory and forfeit their property. If they returned, they were effectively outlaws; providing them the use of fire or water was illegal, and they could be killed at will without legal penalty. Interdicere aquae et ignis was traditionally imposed by the , and is attested to have been in use during the of the third century BC by . It was later also applied by many other officials, such as the , magistrates, and as a and provincial governor during the . It fell out of use during the . Homo sacer Homo sacer (Latin for "the sacred man" or "the accursed man") is a figure of : a person who is and may be killed by anybody, but may not be in a religious ritual. The meaning of the term sacer in is not fully congruent with the meaning it took after Christianization, and which was adopted into English as sacred. In early Roman religion sacer denotes anything "set apart" from common society and encompasses both the sense of "hallowed" and that of "cursed". This concept of the sacred contrasts with the Hebrew dichotomy of "cursed/prohibited" and "sacred", expressed by "cherem" and "qadosh". The homo sacer could thus also simply mean a person expunged from society and deprived of all and all functions in . Homo sacer is defined in legal terms as someone who can be killed without the killer being regarded as a murderer; and a person who cannot be sacrificed. The sacred human may thus be understood as someone outside the law, or beyond it. With respect to certain monarchs, in certain western legal traditions, the concepts of the sovereign and of the homo sacer have been conflated. The term sacred man could also have been used because the condemned could only rely on protection of gods. The status of homo sacer could fall upon one as a consequence of oath-breaking. An in antiquity was essentially a conditional self-cursing, i.e. invoking one or several deities and asking for their punishment in the event of breaking the oath. An oathbreaker was consequently considered the property of the gods whom he had invoked and then deceived. If the oathbreaker was killed, this was understood as the revenge of the gods into whose power he had given himself. Since the oathbreaker was already the property of the oath deity, he could no longer belong to human society, or be consecrated to another deity. A direct reference to this status is found in the (8.21), laws of the early Roman Republic written in the fifth century BC. The paragraph states that a who deceives his clients is to be regarded as sacer. The idea of the status of an , a criminal who is declared as unprotected by the law and can consequently be killed by anyone with impunity, persists throughout the . Medieval perception condemned the entire human intrinsic moral worth of the outlaw, dehumanizing the outlaw literally as a "wolf" or "wolf's-head" (in an era where hunting of wolves existed strongly, including a commercial element) and is first revoked only by the English act of 1679 which declares that any criminal must be judged by a tribunal before being punished. Italian philosopher takes the concept as the starting point of his main work (1998). England , a heroic outlaw in English folklore}} In , an outlaw was a person who had defied the laws of the realm, by such acts as ignoring a to court, or fleeing instead of appearing to plead when charged with a . The earliest reference to outlawry in English legal texts appears in the 8th century. Criminal The term outlawry ''referred to the formal procedure of declaring someone an outlaw, i.e. putting him outside the sphere of legal protection. In the of England, a judgment of (criminal) outlawry was one of the harshest penalties in the legal system, since the outlaw could not use the legal system for protection, e.g. from . To be declared an outlaw was to suffer a form of or death. The outlaw was debarred from all civilized society. No one was allowed to give him food, shelter, or any other sort of support – to do so was to commit the crime of , and to be in danger of the ban oneself. A more recent concept of " " is similar, but implies that a trial is desired (namely if the wanted person is returned alive), whereas outlawry precludes a trial. , was outlawed in 1597 by a coroner's court for the murder of Henry Long. He went to France and joined the French army; two years later he was pardoned by Queen and returned to England.}} An outlaw might be killed with impunity; and it was not only lawful but meritorious to kill a thief fleeing from justice — to do so was not . A man who slew a thief was expected to declare the fact without delay, otherwise the dead man's kindred might and require the slayer to pay weregild as for a true man. By the rules of common law, a criminal outlaw did not need to be guilty of the crime for which he was an outlaw. If a man was accused of a treason or but failed to appear in court to defend himself, he was deemed to be convicted of the said offence. If he was accused of a , then he was guilty of a serious contempt of court which was itself a capital crime. In the context of , outlawry faded out, not so much by legal changes as by the greater population density of the country, which made it harder for wanted fugitives to evade capture; and by the adoption of international pacts. It was obsolete by the time the offence was abolished in 1938. Outlawry was, however, a living practice as of 1855: in 1841, a William John Bankes, formerly a MP on several times 1810...1835, was outlawed by due process of law for absenting himself from trial for indecent exposure, and died in 1855 in Venice as an outlaw. Civil There was also a doctrine of civil outlawry. Civil outlawry did not carry the sentence of capital punishment. It was however imposed on defendants who fled or evaded justice when sued for civil actions like debts or torts. The punishments for civil outlawry were nevertheless harsh, including confiscation of chattels (movable property) left behind by the outlaw. In the civil context, outlawry became obsolescent in by reforms that no longer required summoned s to appear and plead. Still, the possibility of being declared an outlaw for derelictions of duty continued to exist in English law until 1879 and, in until the late 1940s. Since then, failure to find the defendant and serve process is usually interpreted in favour of the plaintiff, and harsh penalties for mere nonappearance (merely presumed flight to escape justice) no longer apply. In other countries was outlawed by the Icelandic for three years (so in about 982 he went and explored Greenland).}} and his gang of s were outlawed by the , Australia}} Outlawry also existed in other ancient legal codes, such as the ancient and . In early modern times, the term and its cognates came to be used in Germany, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, referring to a person stripped of his civil rights being "free" for the taking like a bird. In Germany and Slavic countries in 15th–19th centuries groups of outlaws composed from former prisoners, soldiers etc. became an important social phenomenon. They lived from robbery and their activity was often supported by local inhabitants from lower classes. The best known are and in Slovakia, in Ukraine, in Hungary, and in Germany etc. The concept of outlawry was reintroduced to British law by several Australian colonial governments in the late 19th century to deal with the menace of . The of provided that a judge could, upon proof of sufficiently notorious conduct, issue a special requiring a person to submit themselves to police custody before a given date, or be declared an outlaw. An outlawed person could be apprehended "alive or dead" by any of the Queen's subjects, "whether a constable or not", and without "being accountable for using of any deadly weapon in aid of such apprehension." Similar provisions were passed in and . Although the provisions of the New South Wales Felons Apprehension Act were not exercised after the end of the bushranging era, they remained on the statute book until 1976. The made extensive use of outlawry in the persecution of Jews or other persons deemed undesirable to the state. As political weapon on after his surrender to the British in 1815.}} There have been many instances in military and/or political conflicts throughout History whereby one side declares the other as being "illegal", notorious cases being the use of in Republican Rome's civil wars. In later times there was the notable case of whom the , on 13 March 1815, . In modern times, the government of the , unable to reduce the rebellion centered in , declared the Cartagena fleet to be " ", which allowed any nation to prey on it. Taking the opposite road, some outlaws became political leaders, such as 's Kassa Hailu who became Emperor . Popular usage Though the judgment of outlawry is now obsolete (even though it inspired the pro forma which is still to this day introduced in the during the ), romanticised outlaws became s in several fictional settings. This was particularly so in the United States, where outlaws were popular subjects of newspaper coverage and stories in the 19th century, and 20th century fiction and s. Thus, "outlaw" is still commonly used to mean those violating the law or, by extension, those living that lifestyle, whether actual criminals evading the law or those merely opposed to "law-and-order" notions of conformity and authority (such as the " " music movement in the 1970s). References Category:Civilization